The dream of assembling a "best" culture from elements of all cultures

From Turning Japanese by Katrina Gulliver. Both a book review and a social observation.

The growing number of disaffected Westerners who seek the secret to a fulfilled life in other cultures are bound to be disappointed.

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A few years ago there was a brief mania for hygge, the Danish concept of domestic comfort. The theory seemed to be that Danes, with their knitted slippers, tea-light candles, and fireplaces, had discovered the secret to a better way of life. Multiple books emerged trying to teach us about the wonders of a hygge-filled existence.

[snip]

This year, the Japanese way of life seems to have replaced hygge as rootless Americans’ go-to aspiration, at least judging by the best-seller lists. And while there’s plenty worth learning about Japanese culture, anyone looking for the secret to a meaningful life is bound to be disappointed.

[snip]

In fact, the notion of “living Japanese” — the idea that the secret to happiness lies in adopting a culture other than one’s own — is in itself odd, even setting aside the dubious assertion that the Japanese have it all figured out. (Japan’s unusually high suicide rates would seem to suggest that the Japanese do not, in fact, have it all figured out.) Many of us in the West, raised to believe we could be anything, feel restless or unfulfilled by all our unreached goals. The forms of support and validation that our ancestors had (religion, community) are devalued. We live miles from where we grew up, and by and large don’t share our lives with those around us. And our alienation is unlikely to be alleviated by drinking tea from handmade cups or peacefully contemplating the beauty of a falling leaf.

We are constantly traveling this same road. Each new generation of the privileged Mandarin Class arrogantly discards their own native belief systems in order to signal exoticism and existential depth. They not only discard their native belief systems and culture, they frequently bad-mouth it and denigrate it.

And it never works. Cultures and belief systems are not things that can be imported. It is like trying to make a Mac OS work on a Windows machine. There are ways to make it work but it is hard and involves all sorts of negative trade-offs.

It is like the dream of Esperanto. The idea that we can plan a better language by assembling the best elements of many language systems. It is a neat idea that comes close to working in the hot-house environment of academia but which can't survive in the wild.

Whatever belief system into which you are born is imprinted onto you for life. It can be modified, it can be improved, it can be changed based on learning from other cultures (or from experience). But it cannot be replaced.

There is no cultural tabula rasa from which you can mix and match attributes from multiple cultures. Each culture is a complex and intricate system centered around a variety of noxious trade-offs. As soon as you change one element here, it throws things out of whack over there. Trying to assemble a worldview from assorted cultures is a fools errand ending in catastrophe.

In the mid-1980's there was a huge existential dread in Washington D.C. in particular and in America in general. The Soviet Union was still extant and appeared to still have momentum, supporting revolutions around the globe, intervening in Afghanistan, influencing academia, creating spy networks that occasionally came to light. We had a nuclear armed opponent.

We also had a commercially armed opponent in a rising Japan which had, on the back of MITI and a semi-planned economy, gone from strength-to-strength from the ashes of World War II to a commanding position in many global industries such as the automotive industry. Everything they did appeared destined for success.

Domestically, crime was at historic highs and we were in the middle of the decline of the Rust Belt, a cocaine epidemic, the AIDS plague, and the first wave of massive illegal immigration.

In our current era so concerned about obnoxious, shouting ignorant but passionate kids on university campuses and media so fantastically concerned about how rude the president is to journalists and social justice ideologues, it is hard to recall those dark days. America seemed threatened, in decline, and our way of life not well-suited to a future that belonged to planned, or at least centrally managed economies. Notions of freedom and civil rights and free speech and religion all seemed to be headed for the trash heap of history despite our continuing commitment to them.

Everywhere, especially among public intellectuals, there were calls for America to be more planned and to be more like Japan. They were communal. The people took precedence over individuals.

Classical Liberals (now called conservatives) retained the faith in individualism, rule of law, consent of the governed, etc. but they were voices in the wilderness.

James Fallow, a journalist, took himself and his family to live in rising Asia, spending a year or two in each of China, Japan, and Malaysia. In 1989 he came out with More Like Us; Making America Great Again (and no, its just coincidence; he is a dues-paying member of the center left media not a proto-Trump).

His argument was that while there were strengths and things to be learned from each of these different cultures (though focusing primarily on Japan and China) there were also grave weaknesses and inconsistencies which made their strengths impossible to transfer. Communalism has nice aspects over individualism but it fosters xenophobia and bland stagnant conformity. Central planning allows great focus on selected problems but it ensures that many other problems fail to attract attention and it imposes an enormous burden (up to and including death) on people. On and on.

Instead of heeding the siren call to be more like China or Japan, Fallows argued that we should be more like us. We are founded on openness and rule of law and equality before the law and consent of the governed and enumerated freedoms, individualism, etc. All these things insure non-conformity and variety. These things make our way of life tactically messy in the short term but they ensure a robustness and resolute capacity for progress strategically and in the long term. His message was that we should learn from China and Japan but even more importantly we should not try and be like Japan or China, we should remember what fueled our own greatness and be more like us.

The subsequent thirty years has borne out the wisdom of those recommendations. Shortly after the book came out, Japan began to falter. The policies of centrally planned and managed economies of Asia led to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis which threatened the collapse of the global financial and trading system.

China has continued its indisputable success based on its introduction of a partial market economy. However both nations are sharply threatened by debt levels that throw even America's dangerous levels into the shade. They are also demographically imperiled with rapidly aging populations accompanied by an apparently permanent collapse in fertility.

No one is on a comfortable glide path of success. America also has its challenges. But we have learned that you cannot mix and match cultures. Well, most of us have learned that. Academics, public intellectuals and fad promoters are still committed to the idea that just the right tea cup, or breathing exercise, or seafood diet, or calisthenics or yoga or style of furnishing, or some other exotic cultural import, will, on its own, bring Eden back to earth.

We've all been given different operating systems. Lets each make the best of that OS, always improving and optimizing. But let's not fool ourselves that we can easily run them together simultaneously.